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Press Adds ‘What if?’ to Five W’s in France

With much of France on vacation or in a vacation state of mind, newspapers have turned to more creative writing to draw readers.Credit
Bertrand Guay/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PARIS — What does a newspaper do over the summer in a country where nearly everybody goes on vacation at the same time?

With many French journalists (and their sources) away from late July to late August and many vacationing readers less inclined than ever to read daily reports about Europe’s dreary economy or global turmoil, newspapers and magazines here leave some of the news behind in favor of far more creative writing.

Articles on offer this summer starred the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire and that most golden of monarchs, Louis XIV, as well as a series of “interviews” with long-dead composers, and ventures into somewhat esoteric historical fiction like “what if the oil embargo of 1973 had gone on longer?”

Rather than turning to shark attacks or celebrity scandals while the country burns through what is typically five weeks of vacation time, the French press uses the seasonal torpor to run pieces that entertain with a literary flair, if also a sometimes tenuous link to reality.

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Newspapers like Libération and Le Figaro have featured historical fiction about figures like Jean-Marie Le Pen.

“We have very long holidays here, and you cannot really work, you can’t find your usual sources, but you have to fill the newspaper,” said Alexandra Schwartzbrod, the deputy managing editor of Libération, a leftist daily newspaper.

Rather than being seen as obscure, newspapers that offer flights of fancy, or a quirky turn on history (there was a series on great autopsies and another on famous impostors) do well. Read closely, some of these pieces are highly political but less dogmatic than editorials. They draw on the fondness in France for discussing books and all things intellectual; while the fiction best-seller lists include the latest Dan Brown novel, “Inferno,” the top nonfiction book at the moment is “A Summer With Montaigne” by Antoine Compagnon.

This summer, Libération ran a series of 40 essays of historical fiction (it is the paper’s 40th anniversary) on what the world — or at least France — would have been like if real events had turned out differently. For instance, what if the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen had become prime minister? (Answer: abortion becomes a crime; the death penalty is reinstated; the remains of Philippe Pétain, who was a World War I hero but then led France’s Vichy government, are disinterred from the cemetery near his last prison and reburied with other World War I veterans.)

Another essay considered a Y2K bug that lived up to popular fears. Clocks were reset to 1900, and Marcel Proust communicated with French sailors on a nuclear submarine — the piece had both a zaniness and a creativity that is unheard-of in American newspaper writing. However improbable the conjectures, the conceit was provocative, inviting the reader into an imaginary salon where people have the time and frame of reference to use their imaginations for pure pleasure.

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Le Figaro's topics of political fiction included François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president.Credit
Lionel Cironneau/Associated Press

“People look to Libération for irony, for satire, the summer notebooks are a way to criticize things in a playful way,” said Éric Loret, an editor at the paper, who worked on the historical fiction essays.

Le Figaro, a paper seen as a bastion of the political right, has been running a 17-part series of political fiction. It imagines that the current Socialist president, François Hollande, visits the tomb of the former Socialist president, François Mitterrand, in the middle of the night accompanied by a former conservative president, Jacques Chirac.

Mr. Hollande, in this telling, explains to Mr. Chirac that he has been encouraged by the spirit of Mr. Mitterrand to dissolve the National Assembly, which would provoke new legislative elections. Political mayhem ensues. At the end of the series, it turns out that it is all a grand joke by Mr. Hollande, but when asked how he actually plans to address France’s problems, his answer is, “I do not know.” It is a way for Le Figaro to write about what it sees as Mr. Hollande’s weak leadership.

Le Figaro's weekly magazine has been running “interviews” by a music writer with dead composers like Richard Wagner.Credit
Trinquart/Associated Press

In the piece on Offenbach, the writer tries to depict his character by describing the composer as constantly interrupting the interview to talk to and about singers he is auditioning for his next operetta.

The articles even carry a date that corresponds to each composer’s lifetime: Sept. 12, 1873, for Offenbach, who died in 1880.

Behind the talkiness and the whimsy lies a deep difference between the role of the French and American press.

“We don’t have a popular press in France at all,” said Erwann Gaucher, a media critic who directs the regional Web sites for France Télévision and teaches at the journalism school at Sciences Po in Paris, referring to the media outlets that exist in Britain and the United States. “These papers are aimed at people who are clearly part of a higher class and socioprofessional category.”

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The 19th-century composer Jacques Offenbach has also been a subject.Credit
Hulton Archive — Getty Images

“There is an aspect of being in a club of peers during the summer, so let’s talk about beautiful things, like a club of people who like the Enlightenment,” he said.

Mr. Loret of Libération added that it is something of an expectation, particularly of the well educated in France, to know some Victor Hugo poetry, some Voltaire and a smattering of the work of many other literary and philosophical figures.

Since writers have backgrounds similar to their readers’, these topics seem like natural fodder.

Le Monde, which is left-leaning but viewed as the country’s newspaper of record, took a somewhat more down-to-earth approach to the summer-series tradition this year, with its look at “great autopsies,” including those of Ludwig van Beethoven, Michael Jackson and Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old mummy found in 1991 in the Alps.

Mr. Gaucher sees all these efforts as an example of French journalists’ predilection for being clever and writerly, but not necessarily for producing what might elsewhere be considered good journalism.

“There are a lot of journalists in France who are more or less consciously writers who don’t write and here suddenly in the summer they have a bit of space, they have a bit of time to address topics that aren’t journalism anymore,” he said.

“But it creates something rather strange: right now there is as much news as there is at any other time of year, most notably in Egypt, but it’s the time when they are going to write about ‘the most beautiful places in France’ or ‘great philosophers,’ or ‘our ancestors, the Gauls.’ It’s completely crazy.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 29, 2013, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Press Adds ‘What if?’ To Five W’s In France. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe